Minority report

The trouble with integration

CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, where last year's riots started, is only 15km (9 miles) north-east of the tree-lined avenues of central Paris. To get there by public transport, though, takes nearly an hour and a half. The suburban RER train goes only to Le Raincy; then it is a slow, winding uphill bus ride to Clichy-sous-Bois. In less time, the high-speed TGV travels from Paris to Lille, 220km away. Ask locals in Clichy how often they travel to central Paris, and you draw a blank.

ReutersNothing better to do

A year ago, two youngsters were electrocuted in Clichy after climbing into an electricity sub-station, apparently while running away from the police. Their deaths triggered three weeks of rioting and car-burning in rough banlieue neighbourhoods across France, prompting the government to impose a state of emergency.

A year on, the place appears to be calmer. On a weekday after school, boys kick a football on a dusty patch of grass. Mothers, wrapped in bright green and ochre West African printed cloth, push buggies along the pavements. In an effort to improve its image, the town hall has organised a photographic exhibition about the suburb, called “Clichy sans Cliché”.

Yet a sense of isolation and abandonment hangs heavily in the air. One in five of Clichy's 28,300 residents is unemployed; on some housing estates the figure is half. Down the road from the halal “Beurger King Restaurant” (a play on the slang word for French-born Arab, beur), hooded youngsters of black African and North African origin hang out on the pavements. An upturned supermarket trolley lies in the alley between two tower blocks. In one 13-storey housing block, the lift is out of service for three weeks in four.

Over the years, Clichy's housing estates have become home to a mix of tongues, faiths and colours. The names engraved on the second-world-war memorial are Robert and Gabriel; those on the marriage bans posted outside the town hall are Rachida and Suleyman. In Clichy the disconnection from the capital is keenly felt. “I'm not Parisian, I'm from 9-3,” says one young man, referring to the department that covers the northern Paris banlieues.

Clichy has no police station, though one has been promised. When the police do appear, in vans, young men feel they are being picked on. “The police have a difficult time because innocent youths and criminal youths dress the same and speak the same,” says Claude Dilain, Clichy's Socialist mayor. “There's a feeling that they are all hassled.”

A different sort of uprising

When the riots started, they were treated in some quarters as a “suburban intifada”. “Jihad comes home”, ran one newspaper headline. Some American observers regarded the uprising as further proof of Europe's inability to control the spread of radical Islam. France has Europe's biggest Muslim population—an estimated 5m, or 8% of France's inhabitants—so it comes under special scrutiny.

A report into the riots by the French Renseignements Généraux, the domestic intelligence-gathering service, however, found the opposite. Islamists had “no role in setting off the violence or in fanning it,” it concluded. Clichy's mayor agrees. “I completely reject the idea that the riots were an Islamist plot,” he says. “During the rioting I never heard of a young man burning a car in the name of Allah; but I heard of plenty of Muslims saying, 'go home in the name of Allah'.”

Instead, the intelligence officers reckoned, the rioting was a “popular revolt” provoked by a toxic concentration of social problems: joblessness, poverty, illegal immigration, organised crime, family breakdown and a lack of parental authority. France had been so preoccupied with watching Islamic radicals, said the report, that it had neglected the wider problems in its banlieues. On certain housing estates, adds Alain Bauer, a criminologist, organised criminal gangs, shaken by recent police raids, took advantage of the uprising. By first encouraging and then calming the rioters, he says, the gangs tried to remind the police of their power.

“The problem is not Islam”, says Olivier Roy, an Islamic scholar, “but integration.” France clearly has no monopoly on a ghettoised, isolated underclass, but the lack of work makes integration in its banlieues particularly difficult. “The only integration that means anything is a job,” says Samir Mihi, a youth worker at Clichy's town hall whose parents are from Algeria.

Clichy has no government-run job centre, so the jobless have to catch a bus to a neighbouring suburb to peruse job vacancies and talk to a job-placement adviser. Many of those who make the effort say that their applications get nowhere; they suspect that a foreign-sounding name, or the local postcode, puts employers off. An experiment by the University of Paris I, using identical CVs, showed that a white-sounding French name produced five times as many invitations to an interview as a North African name. There is racial discrimination on an “undreamed-of scale”, said the Institut Montaigne in a landmark 2004 report.

Because of the relative lack of social mobility out of France's banlieues, the multi-ethnic nature of the French population is not reflected at the top—other than in sport and popular culture. The French establishment is dominated by white men. There is not a single member of parliament of non-white immigrant origin representing mainland France. There are only two prefects and hardly any mayors. “Where is the French Condoleezza Rice or Colin Powell?” asked Mr Sarkozy, who advocates affirmative action, on a recent trip to America. When Harry Roselmack, a black Frenchman, was selected this summer as evening news anchor on France's top TV channel, TF1, his face was splashed across the front pages.

How French can you get?

France's integrationist doctrine firmly rejects official recognition of separate communities. In the past this has helped to mould generations of foreigners—Italians, Poles, Portuguese—into Frenchmen. But the children of later inflows—Algerians and Moroccans, then Malians, Ivorians and Senegalese—have found it more difficult to fit in. The persistence of a large jobless multi-ethnic underclass, combined with the dearth of non-white faces in top jobs, mocks France's claim to be colourblind. “Under the cover of an abstract concept of 'equality',” says Mr Baverez, the author, French society “practises a pitiless form of apartheid”.

The exceptional RoselmackAFP

Does this mean that the French integration model has failed? Not necessarily. Indeed, in the wake of the London terrorist attacks in July 2005, some British multiculturalists who once castigated the French for banning the Muslim headscarf in state schools are looking with fresh interest at France's way of instilling a sense of citizenship. The French approach does have its strengths. France has an unapologetic sense of national identity, taught to every child at primary school. The tricolore flag flutters outside every town hall. Official documents are available only in French, and the language is regarded as a passport to integration. After a bloody struggle against authoritarian Catholicism, church and state were separated in 1905 and religion firmly banished to the private sphere; the French have bent over backwards ever since to keep it there, under a version of secularism they call laïcité.

This unambiguous, well-articulated sense of nationhood seems to rub off on its newer citizens. A recent study by the Pew Centre showed that, whereas 81% of British Muslims considered themselves to be more Muslim than British, only 46% of French Muslims considered themselves to be more Muslim than French.

The challenge for France is to put sufficient trust in the strengths of its republican system to deal with its weaknesses. For example, it could introduce some sort of affirmative action without embracing multiculturalism wholesale. Two of the grandes écoles, Sciences-Po and ESSEC, have experimented with special admission for students from the banlieues, chiefly by setting up links to schools there, with great success. Neither has resorted to quotas, nor to labelling ethnic minorities, which France resists so strongly.

France cannot treat the problems in the banlieues merely as a security issue. For sure, on the worst estates crime continues daily, and is often violent. But the only real solution is to build ladders out of the banlieues, with jobs at the end of them. “Unemployment destroys all social models,” says Louis Schweitzer, former CEO of Renault and head of France's new anti-discrimination body.

France's riots may not have been about Islamic radicalism, but that does not mean that France is sheltered from militant Islam, nor from Islamist terrorism. The banlieues are fertile ground for recruitment. Of the 1,600 mosques in France only about 50 are considered militant. Yet they toil efficiently to win the minds of the young, jobless and disaffected.

Security matters

The country's robust surveillance regime, combined with extensive judicial counter-terrorism powers, enables it to keep a close watch on Islamist activity. Mr Sarkozy does not hesitate to expel militant clerics. In France, suspects can be charged simply for “association” with those plotting terrorist attacks.

Two routes to radicalisation are of particular concern, though. One is conversion: there are thought to be 30,000-50,000 Muslims in France who have embraced the religion only in recent years. A small number are among France's most virulent Islamists, such as Pierre Robert, alias “Yacoub”, who is currently serving time in Morocco for the 2003 terrorist attack in Casablanca.

The other route is proselytising in prison. Well over half of France's inmates are Muslim, and radicals find jail a fruitful place to spread their message. Overall, French counter-terrorism authorities have identified a hard core of 50-100 would-be terrorists, provided with moral and material support by a few hundred others.

Security operations aside, France has also made an effort to temper militant Muslim groups through co-option. In 2003, despite its secular status, it took the unusual step of setting up a religious body, the French Council of the Muslim Faith. It was put in the moderate hands of Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Paris Mosque, but included some hardline groups.

The council has struggled to earn credibility. The real hardliners—the Tabligh, or Salafists—lurk way beyond its reach. And it has been beset by political infighting at national level. Yet it has been useful in some ways. Even its more militant leaders, for instance, condemned hostage-takers in Iraq who demanded that France repeal its headscarf ban.

All the same, nobody is suggesting that France has solved the challenge of Islamic radicalisation. Indeed, the country is keenly aware that it has recently been named a target by al-Qaeda. Moreover, the recent French decision to send peacekeeping troops to Lebanon is viewed with some unease. For the way France handles its Muslim minority at home is linked with its relations with Muslim states abroad.